Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Append Path variable during installation with Visual Studio

In my previous post, I mentioned that using the Microsoft Visual Studio Setup and Deployment Wizard's Registry Editor to add in your custom application's path to the system path environment variable has an unfortunate side effect - the uninstaller will delete the system path variable.

A better but longer way is to write your own custom action program to add in your custom application's path to the system path environment variable during installation. In the custom action program (I call it AddPath and I use C# in my example code), I call a SetPathVariable function from main as shown below to do the job.

class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
try
{
//Call this function to add in my custom application's location to the system path variable
SetPathVariable();
}
catch
{
}
finally
{
}
}

The SetPathVariable will read in the AddPath program's command line arguments to find the custom application's location.

#region public methods
public static void SetPathVariable()
{
//Read and place the command line arguments into a string array.
//The custom application path is the first argument.
string[] cmd_args = System.Environment.GetCommandLineArgs();

//Now call this function to append the custom application's folder
//to the system Path environment variable
AppendPathVariable(cmd_args[0]);
}


public static void AppendPathVariable(string appPath)
{
try
{
//Filter custom application's path
string loc = GetPathOnly(appPath);
//Get the current value of the Path environment variable
string Value = System.Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("Path", EnvironmentVariableTarget.Machine);

//Only append the custom application's path if it is not already in
//the system Path environment variable.
if (Value.ToUpper().Contains(loc.ToUpper()) == false)
{
Value = Value + ";" + loc;
System.Environment.SetEnvironmentVariable("Path", Value, EnvironmentVariableTarget.Machine);
}
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
Console.WriteLine(ex.Message);
Console.WriteLine(ex.StackTrace);
}
}

//This function simply ensures that the input string is a valid
//path string
public static string GetPathOnly(string url)
{
string outputStr = string.Empty;
string ipurl = url;
char[] delimiter = { '\\'};
string[] values = ipurl.Split(delimiter);
for (int i = 0; i <values.Length - 1; i++)
{
if (i == 0)
{
outputStr = values[i];
}
else
{
outputStr = outputStr + @"\" + values[i];
}
}
return outputStr;
}
#endregion
}

In the Setup and Deployment project, you need to add in this AddPath executable in the Custom Actions Commit phase as shown in the figure below.
In addition, you have to set the Arguments property for AppPath to “[OriginalDatabase]<>[TARGETDIR]<>[ComputerName]", as shown below.
Now your installer will be able to add in your custom application's path to the System Path environment variable correctly without having it deleted by the uninstaller.

Monday, June 22, 2009

Update the Windows Path with Visual Studio Setup and Deployment Wizard (with caveats)

Microsoft Visual Studio.NET 2003/2008 has a setup and deployment wizard which you can use to create installers for your custom applications. During the installation of your application, you might want your installer to automatically add in the path to your custom application executable to the Windows system path.

The Visual Studio setup and deployment project has a Registry Editor which you can use to get your installer to add in your application registry keys and values. For instance, by using the Registry Editor, you can add in the registry keys under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE to set the Windows Path.

Underneath \\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Environment keys, you can add in a Environment String Path value with the string "[%Path];[TARGETDIR]", as shown below.
Once that is done, your installer will automatically set the Windows environment Path variable to include the path to your custom application's executable.

But there is a problem with this method: when you uninstall your custom application, the uninstaller will remove the Path string from the Registry. A better approach would be to create a small Custom Action program to add modify the Registry instead. I will post details about that method later here.

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

How to wait for a VB6-like executable

If you have written any VB6 and earlier programs for running in the Windows Command prompt as batch programs, you would have noticed that control is returned back to you or your calling script almost immediately after execution. There is no convenient way to know when the program execution has completed before executing the next line in your calling script. Global Mapper is an example executable that exhibits the same behavior but it has its batch execution engine that lets you get around this issue.

I have written a C# wrapper program that will wrap around executables that behave like VB6 executables. The wrapper program essentially works like this:
  1. Before starting up an instance of the executable, get a list of all running processes that have the same executable name.
  2. Start up an instance of the executable.
  3. Get a second list of all running processes that has the same executable name.
  4. If the second list has a process id that is not in the first list, then that is my executable instance.
  5. In a while loop, periodically check to see whether my executable instance is still running in the process list. If it is not in the running list, then exit from the loop and return to the calling method.
Example c# code snippets are shown below. The example requires the System.Collections, System.Threading, System.Runtime.InteropServices name spaces.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.IO;
using System.Diagnostics;
using System.Collections;
using System.Threading;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;

class VB6ExeWrapper
{
//This array list will store the list of running vb6exe processes before
//we run our own instance of vb6exe executable
private ArrayList _vb6exeProcesses = null;

//Declare the name of the vb6exe executable we want to run
private string _VB6ExeProcessName = "vb6exe";

#region public properties
public string Vb6ExeProcessName
{
get { return this._VB6ExeProcessName; }
set { this._VB6ExeProcessName = value; }
}
#endregion

#region public methods
public void Execute()
{
ProcessStartInfo Vb6ExeStartInfo = null;
Process theProc = null;
int myProcId = 0;
try
{
//Before invoking our vb6exe executable, get a list of vb6exe processes currently running
_vb6exeProcesses = new ArrayList();
foreach (Process proc in Process.GetProcessesByName(_VB6ExeProcessName))
_vb6exeProcesses.Add(proc.Id);

//Now we can startup our own instance of vb6exe
Vb6ExeStartInfo = new ProcessStartInfo(_VB6ExeProcessName);
Vb6ExeStartInfo.UseShellExecute = false;
theProc = Process.Start(Vb6ExeStartInfo);

//The vb6exe process has started. Now get a new list of vb6exe processes running.
//Compare that with the first list to determine the process id of our own
//vb6exe instance.
foreach (Process proc in Process.GetProcessesByName(_VB6ExeProcessName))
if (!_vb6exeProcesses.Contains(proc.Id))
{
//this is my vb6exe process!
myProcId = proc.Id;
}

//Use a threaded endless loop to periodically check whether our vbexe instance
//is still running. If it is no longer in the process list, then
//exit the loop
while (isProcessRunning(myProcId) == true)
{
//pause this program thread for 1500 milliseconds
Thread.Sleep(1500);
}
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
throw ex;
}
}
#endregion
#region private methods
private bool isProcessRunning(int procId)
{
bool status = true;
Process proc = null;
try
{
proc = Process.GetProcessById(procId);
if (proc == null)
status = false;
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
status = false;
}
return status;
}
#endregion
}

To use the wrapper, in the calling program code, the following lines of code are sufficient.

wrapper = new VB6ExeWrapper();
wrapper.Execute();
//The next line in the code will be executed only when the wrapper.Execute() method has finished.